On: Trump says he’s making final decision on Iran deal as Tehran slams ‘mixture of t

Diary Entry

The news arrived with the morning post, a thin, flimsy sheet of paper that spoke of final decisions and high-security rooms. I read it over my tea, the steam rising in the chill air of this borrowed sitting-room. They speak of a ‘mixture of truth and lies’ from Tehran, as if this were a remarkable accusation. Is not all statecraft, indeed most human communication, such a mixture? The outsider sees this plainly. The insider must pretend otherwise for the machinery to function.

I think of the roads in Persia I have travelled, the dust and the hospitality, the complex web of loyalties and resentments that no document in a Situation Room could ever capture. A ‘final decision’ suggests a terminus, a neat close to a matter. But my experience of the world is that roads do not end; they merely become more difficult, or join with others heading in unforeseen directions. The practicalities are always omitted: the cost in coin and blood, the state of the routes for supply and retreat, the temperature of the public square where opinions are formed far from the polished table.

They will debate abstractions - security, deals, truth. Meanwhile, the price of bread will rise in the bazaars I remember, and the merchants will shrug with a weariness that diplomats never learn to interpret. The incongruity is this: that men in closed rooms believe they can decide the fate of mountain passes and crowded tea-houses they have never seen, their maps devoid of the true contours of life. I note it without surprise. It is the way of empires. They inventory power, but seldom notice the people until the road becomes impassable.